select()--Synchronous I/O Multiplexing

This function is somewhat strange, but it's very useful. Take the following situation: you are a server and you want to listen for incoming connections as well as keep reading from the connections you already have.

No problem, you say, just an accept() and a couple of recv()s. Not so fast, buster! What if you're blocking on an accept() call? How are you going to recv() data at the same time? "Use non-blocking sockets!" No way! You don't want to be a CPU hog. What, then?

select() gives you the power to monitor several sockets at the same time. It'll tell you which ones are ready for reading, which are ready for writing, and which sockets have raised exceptions, if you really want to know that.

The function monitors "sets" of file descriptors; in particular readfds, writefds, and exceptfds. If you want to see if you can read from standard input and some socket descriptor, sockfd, just add the file descriptors 0 and sockfd to the set readfds. The parameter numfds should be set to the values of the highest file descriptor plus one. In this example, it should be set to sockfd+1, since it is assuredly higher than standard input (0).

When select() returns, readfds will be modified to reflect which of the file descriptors you selected is ready for reading. You can test them with the macro FD_ISSET(), below.

Before progressing much further, I'll talk about how to manipulate these sets. Each set is of the type fd_set. The following macros operate on this type:

FD_ZERO(fd_set *set) - clears a file descriptor set

FD_SET(int fd, fd_set *set) - adds fd to the set

FD_CLR(int fd, fd_set *set) - removes fd from the set

FD_ISSET(int fd, fd_set *set) - tests to see if fd is in the set

Finally, what is this weirded out struct timeval? Well, sometimes you don't want to wait forever for someone to send you some data. Maybe every 96 seconds you want to print "Still Going..." to the terminal even though nothing has happened. This time structure allows you to specify a timeout period. If the time is exceeded and select() still hasn't found any ready file descriptors, it'll return so you can continue processing.

Just set tv_sec to the number of seconds to wait, and set tv_usec to the number of microseconds to wait. Yes, that's microseconds, not milliseconds. There are 1,000 microseconds in a millisecond, and 1,000 milliseconds in a second. Thus, there are 1,000,000 microseconds in a second. Why is it "usec"? The "u" is supposed to look like the Greek letter Mu that we use for "micro". Also, when the function returns, timeout might be updated to show the time still remaining. This depends on what flavor of Unix you're running.

Yay! We have a microsecond resolution timer! Well, don't count on it. Standard Unix timeslice is 100 milliseconds, so you'll probably have to wait at least that long, no matter how small you set your struct timeval.

Other things of interest: If you set the fields in your struct timeval to 0, select() will timeout immediately, effectively polling all the file descriptors in your sets. If you set the parameter timeout to NULL, it will never timeout, and will wait until the first file descriptor is ready. Finally, if you don't care about waiting for a certain set, you can just set it to NULL in the call to select().

The following code snippet waits 2.5 seconds for something to appear on standard input:

If you're on a line buffered terminal, the key you hit should be RETURN or it will time out anyway.

Now, some of you might think this is a great way to wait for data on a datagram socket -- and you are right: it might be. Some Unices can use select in this manner, and some can't. You should see what your local man page says on the matter if you want to attempt it.

One final note of interest about select(): if you have a socket that is listen()'ing, you can check to see if there is a new connection by putting that socket's file descriptor in the readfds set.